Shīrīn and Other Female Archetypes in Firdausī’s Shāhnāmah

Summary

Dite-moi où, n’en quel pays,

Est Flora la belle Romaine,

Archipiades, ne Thaïs,

Qui fut sa cousine germaine,

Écho parlant quand bruit on mène

Dessus rivière ou sur étang,

Qui beauté eut trop plus qu’humaine

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

(François Villon, Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis)

As has been asserted by some scholars, the major theme of the Shāhnāmah is the struggle for the possession of the farr (royal glory). Shīrīn, the widow of Khusrau Parvīz, proclaimed in front of the new shah, her stepson Shīrūyah, that she was “the head of the ladies (sar-i bānuvān) and the glory of the king (farr-i shāh).” She also boasted about her virtues when her stepson harshly accused her of witchcraft. In her speech before the chosen nobles of Iran, she tried to rebut, as Helen had once done in front of all the Trojans, accusations against her honor and showed her illustrious beauty to the Iranian nobles who once so strongly opposed her marriage to Khusrau. First, she recounted all virtues a married woman may have:

Three things make / The worth of women that bedeck the throne

Of greatness: one is modesty and wealth

Wherewith her husband may adorn his house;

The next is bearing blessed sons, that she

May e’en exceed her spouse in happiness;

The third is having beauty and fine form,

Joined with the love of a sequestered life.

When I was mated to Khusrau Parviz,

And entered on seclusion, he had come

Weak and dispirited from Rum to live

Within our land, but after reached such power

As none had heard of or had looked upon.

Moreover I have had four sons by him

To his great joy—Nastur, Shahriar, Farud,

And Mardanshah, blue heaven's coronal.

Jamshid and Faridun had not such sons;

When the great Kayanian king of mythical times, Kay Khusrau, reminisced at the end of his reign about the ideal women of the past, he evoked the memory of four women, namely, the two sisters of Jamshīd: Māhāfarīd, the daughter of Tūr, and his own mother, Farangīs, the daughter of Afrāsiyāb. Shahrnāz and Arnavāz, the sisters of Jamshī, were forced after the fall of their brother to marry the tyrant Zahhāk who corrupted them through his evil magic.